I stumbled across another great video of Michael Wesch talking about the issues facing educationalists. Many of the problems they face are the same as those faced by people involved in producing user assistance. The video is here Dubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web… Read more »
Category: user assistance
The “Google or Death?” choice for technical authors
July’s edition of Science magazine includes a study that shows scientific researchers are now more inclined to get their information from the Web (specifically, “quick and dirty” searches in Google) than from specialist scientific resources. If scientists are focusing on only a tiny bit of research – the bits served up by Google – what are typical users… Read more »
Which Help Authoring Tool developer will be the first to integrate Google Wave into its application?
Google Wave, the latest tool in development at Google, offers workflow and collaboration capabilities that will be of interest to technical documentation teams. With Google Wave’s open API, there’s the potential for developers of Help Authoring Tools to integrate Wave into its application and into published Help. The first 50 minutes of the video below… Read more »
Why bother with end user documentation for Web Applications?
In Rahel Bailie’s excellent presentation at the STC Conference (“The New Face of Documentation“), she looked at the “No Documentation” approach to software user assistance. This, she summed up, as the “we don’t document it; we just fix it” view of software development. She argued that a “No Documentation” approach doesn’t lead to no documentation. Users soon… Read more »
How can technical authors become part of technology ecosystems?
Jonathan Mitchener has written an article in Engineering and Technology magazine on the interest of technology providers in creating “ecosystems”. This is the concept of offering not just gadgets but also a range of related products and services, which can integrate seamlessly with each other in an overall system. The poster boy for this ecosystem approach is… Read more »